Data center cooling has become a problem of increasing interest as the number of servers and the power each server consumes has been rapidly increasing to meet the increasing demands of computation, transaction processing, telecommunications, and internet usage. With rising energy costs and new incentives for “green” energy use, efficiency has become an important issue.
Data centers are cooled using air conditioning units or ACUs. Typically, data centers are over-provisioned with ACUs where the capacity of the ACUs far exceeds the cooling needs of the data center. By operating too many ACUs in the data center, the efficiency of each ACU decreases.
Therefore, techniques for improving data center cooling efficiency would be desirable.